Scituate
Reservoir: A story of sacrificeIt brought water to
Providence, destroying communities and lives in the process

By
ROBERT L. SMITHJournal Staff Writer

On May 23, 1916, the City of
Providence paid Frank and Lyman Knight $12,150 for their holdings in rural
Scituate, according to records on file with the Providence Water Supply
Board. The father and grandfather
sold 406 acres, two barns, a sawmill and an ice house on Knight Brook. The
bill of sale included two houses, "1
burned." Lyman Knight's ancestors
think they understand the peculiar
entry. Rather than sell his house
to the builders of the Scituate Reservoir, the Knight family patriarch set
it afire, they believe. They imagine he stood in his fields and watched as
two centuries of family history burned so that the city would have its
water. "The Knights were very
strong, stubborn people," said Shirley Arnold of Scituate, a descendent of
Frank and Lyman Knight. "They did not want to leave that
house." A lot of others didn't
want to leave, either. Up the road, in the once-upon-a-time village of
Ponaganset, a farmer told his daughter he was going outside to feed the
livestock, walked into his barn and hanged himself. A neighbor slit his
throat. Most others persevered,
through depressing auctions, hurried moves, a cataclysm they never
imagined possible. Eighty years later, their ancestors try to fathom a
time and a story that lies, like Atlantis, in the watery
deep. Begun in 1915, the Scituate
Reservoir by the mid 1920s flooded a great natural bowl at the headwaters
of the North Branch of the Pawtuxet River, creating Rhode Island's largest
body of fresh water. Some experts believe the ready source of clean water
allowed metropolitan Providence to grow and for Rhode Island to
prosper. More than half the state
drinks water from the lake, which forms a long, crooked V across the belly
of Scituate. Managed wisely, said Richard Rafanovic, the reservoir's chief
engineer, the tap could run
forever. But there was a price to
pay for that consistency and that prosperity. It was borne by about 1,600
mostly quiet, hard-working, rural folks who in 1916 began answering
alarming knocks at the door. It was a man from the city, and he had papers
saying their way of life was over.
Kent, home to the Knights since 1708, fell first. Then all the rest:
Richmond, Ashland, South Scituate, Saundersville, Rockland and Ponaganset,
all abandoned, torn apart board by board, cleared and
drowned. Like others connected to
Scituate's "lost villages," Shirley Arnold sometimes speaks of the decade
with a lingering sadness. She tries to picture her mother, grandparents
and great-grandparents living in a condemned
village. She is a sunny, outgoing
woman, but her voice softens when she surveys the
clues. "You can imagine how they
might have felt," she said. "Over 200 years of family history,
gone." The second decade of a new
century was a time of building the infrastructure for a more affluent,
industrial society. Smithfield was building its own, smaller reservoir,
Stump Pond, today one of the town's prettiest lakes. In Glocester, linemen
stretched wires for the electricity that lit up Chepachet in 1914. The
state was finishing turnpikes that linked northwest towns to a regional
highway system. As they built up
the home front, Rhode Islanders also helped shape the world. Europe
erupted into a great war, and recruiting stations in Johnston and North
Providence were busy with volunteers. At the end of the decade, the towns
welcomed their warriors home with parades and monuments, but there was
little revelry in Scituate. In the
reservoir town, World War I offered only a respite from the breathtaking
work under way. The city had been
eying Scituate water since the mid-1800s. A half-dozen reservoir plans
were formulated, only to collapse. Perhaps a sense of complacency had
settled on the town, historians say. And perhaps no one could really
believe what was happening.
Scituate in the mid-1910s was a network of little company towns linked by
electric trolley lines. People worked in textile mills for $15 a week or
farmed their land. Many did both.
"Everybody had animals, a cow, maybe a goat, something to live on," said
Frank Spencer, 91, who pronounces his hometown the old way, with a long A
at the end, "SICH-u-aate." He was
8 years old in 1916, but a boy never forgets men behind mule teams digging
a reservoir in an era without bulldozers. He recalls more vividly the
muleskinners, exotic men from Arkansas, who on Sunday afternoons led their
mules through tricks to the amazement of the Rhode Islanders. And he
remembers the mill villages that to him were great, teeming
cities. Richmond was home to four
mills, a school, a town hall and tenements that housed 600 mill workers.
But most of the condemned communities were more like Kent, a postcard
village with a mill, a church and a few dozen families that had lived
there seemingly forever. They were
15 miles but a world away from the State House in Providence, said town
historian Barbara Sarkesian.
"People didn't really understand what was happening," she said. "This was
pretty much a done deal when the folks heard about
it." In 1914, the General Assembly
rejected a bill to condemn the reservoir lands and seize them by powers of
eminent domain. But the very next spring, it passed the measure and the
governor signed it. The state empowered a newly formed Providence Water
Supply Board to appraise and buy property and clear it
away. By December 1916, the
condemnation notices went out.
"They came to your house with liens. They served them personally," said
Spencer, who has amassed a large body of photos and history of the lost
villages. Like a baseball statistician, he can recite the loss at season's
end: 375 houses, 233 barns, 30 dairy farms, 7 schools, 6 churches, a
railroad. He said the mill owners
generally did well in the exchange. The mill era was fading anyway. But
the mill workers and small farmers received take-it-or-leave-it offers
that few considered fair. Some
protested. Some fought the condemnations in court, but no one prevailed,
Sarkesian said. Some tried to make the best of
it. Letter writers poked defiant
fun at Providence in local newspapers as late as
1918.

The water sharks of
Providence Good judgment seem to
lack If they will take a trip up
here They'll find us on the
map

William H. Joslin, a
wealthy farmer and mill owner, built the Richmond Casino, a movie house
and dance hall, in the condemned village of Richmond in 1919. According to
Spencer, Joslin is reported to have said, "We might as well have a good
time until we leave." But by then,
a desperate atmosphere had settled on the land. Sarkesian displays a
yellowed letter written by a Mrs. Leach of Ashland to a Mr. Williams,
written in hurried sentences and hand
delivered. When I went away from
your father's house he owed me four weeks pay. I hate to send for it but I
have to have it. I need it so bad.
It is only $4. I wish you would send it down this week, for we are going
to move. Send it to me if you can.
I think we must move next week. I need it so
bad. The letter is dated July 8,
1919. Ashland was cleared that
summer. Some could not bear what
was happening. Spencer tells the story of a Ponaganset farmer who went to
the courthouse in Providence to fight his eviction. He arrived home that
afternoon about the same time as his daughter, a teacher in Foster. She
asked him what happened. "We gotta
move," he reportedly said, then went out to feed the animals. A while
later, the daughter went to the barn and found her father hanging from a
beam. Arnold said she has
documented that and seven other suicides, mostly
farmers. More intriguing to her
are the number of families who apparently did as they were told - packed
up, auctioned off what they could not carry, and abandoned their
homes. One family was so angry
they left everything, even dishes on the table, Arnold said. But still
they left. She credits Yankee
stoicism, a kind of Job-like
fatalism. "A lot of people just
seemed to accept this as their lot in life," she
said. But she also thinks many
were simply overwhelmed, as one might be if a hurricane roared
through. In the 1910s, earth was
moved with mule teams and steam shovels and strong backs. Mills and houses
were demolished by hand. At times, more than 400 men worked on the
reservoir. "Overnight, all these
men, surveyors and contractors, were all around," said Arnold. "The
construction workers came in like gangs out of the city. You know, these
are quiet little mill towns. I think it happened so quickly, they just
couldn't do anything about it."
Arnold is a retired librarian who helped create the local history archives
at the North Scituate Library. Tracing her genealogy drew her to interview
family elders about the coming of the
reservoir. The interviews were not
easy. She was broaching a subject the family rarely discussed, she said.
Still, it's her history, too. Her
mother was born in the family home in Kent. Growing up, Arnold said, she
would hear her mother or grandmother refer to "the old place." For years,
Arnold was told, the family would drive back to see where the house stood,
before Kent Dam closed and the waters
rose. She talked to her elders and
learned more, about cooling milk in the brook, about her grandfather, a
horseman, selling horses used to build the
reservoir. Her uncle described
driving cattle by the hundreds up Scituate Avenue to the new farm in
Cranston, and Arnold laughs to imagine the
site. But no one ever described
leaving; no one would talk about the end and how it
felt. The water board kept
meticulous records, photographs of everything it razed. After 20 years'
research, Arnold can breathe life into the clues. She and other Knight
descendents can imagine, now, some of the
unspoken. There's the photo of her
great-grandfather's house, a handsome ranch house with two sitting
porches, three chimneys, a stone
foundation. There's the obituary
the newspaper ran upon the death of her
great-great-grandfather. "He was
often seen in his fields with his son and his grandson," it reads. "His
home was the dearest place to him on
earth." There's the inventory, the
cold record of what the Knights sold to Providence in the spring of 1916 -
2 houses, 1 burned.